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Normally I produce five "cents" each week of the offseason, but because of what happened Friday, this week gets reduced to just my two cents on the labor issue. I'll deal with why Ohio State should have fired Jim Tressel, my futile attempt to like the Arena League, and why I would take Cam Newton at #1 if I'm Carolina, but not at #4 if I'm Cincinnati or #5 if I'm Arizona, I'll deal with all that later.
$.01-- My first reaction to the sobering news of the NFLPA filing decertification papers sticks vividly in my mind. I had a vision of C. Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons
That has to be the reaction of many owners, who now have the leverage of time firmly on their side. Decertification is a bold step by the NFLPA to force a quick resolution, with the thinking apparently being that the owners will cave in to the threat of an expensive, protracted, probably embarrassing court battle. No doubt some owners feel cornered by this move, but I strongly believe the majority of owners are quietly quite pleased with this development.
By decertifying, the union, or rather what used to be the union, can now sue the NFL under the Sherman Act, which deals with antitrust laws. You might recall that the USFL used that tactic, and it worked. Sort of; the USFL won the court case and was awarded exactly $1, which was tripled under antitrust laws. That's the kind of Phyrric victory the players will get, I'm afraid.
Owners have a massive collective war chest to take to any court battle. The players, on the other hand, no longer have the collective to draw from; decertification took away that option, so the plaintiffs (Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Drew Brees and others are the lead plaintiffs) will fund this ostensibly from their own pockets. Seeing as how their primary incomes have stopped, a lengthy court case sure appears highly problematic.
The other big problem for the players now is time. Sure, everyone is pulling together now at a time where the paychecks were already done for the season and the enmity and cohesion is fresh and vibrant. But do they honestly believe that will persist six months from now, when players will start missing checks and have already drained their reserves paying for Cobra insurance and seeing their access to credit increasingly pinched (what banks in this climate are going to extend loads of cash to unemployed athletes?). That's a gross miscalculation fostered by DeMaurice Smith's headlong desire to get this fight into David Doty's court.
To use another television reference, I have a very strong feeling that six months from now the members of the player's union will imitate Gob Bluth from Arrested Development (still the best TV show ever!), with a guttural "I've made a HUGE mistake". They are almost certainly unlikely to get any better of a deal than the NFL offered Friday, and the payoff for taking that deal and wasting millions of dollars in legal fees and alienating millions of fans is to get the "A-ha!" moment when they find out that a handful of NFL teams are not doing much better than breaking even. I hope it's worth it to them.
$.02-- I have to admit to being incredibly confused by all the labor arguments going on this week. I know the NFL and NFLPA positions pretty well and I see merit to both sides' arguments. The thing that baffles me is the leap to decertification. On the same day where the NFL players willingly and proudly renounced their right to collective bargaining, hundreds were arrested in Wisconsin for protesting the forced removal of their collective bargaining rights. It was important enough for many state-employed professionals to go to jail and almost certainly lose their jobs in order to cling to collective bargaining rights. Yet the NFL players so cavalierly toss it away. I just cannot wrap my head around that incredible (using that word literally) juxtaposition of positions.
This all comes at a time where the company my wife works for is embroiled in the early stages of a union labor contract negotiation that is tacking towards acrimonious at her facility. And my brother-in-law is likely to lose his union job in Ohio because of budgetary wars with the entire imbroglio there. We all see the unions making what seem like ponderous demands based on the economic climate. Yet we also see employers, both public and private, giving outrageous compensation to higher-ups and trying to take out all their problems on the backs and pocketbooks of the workers, often with zero correlation between the root of the problem and the proposed solutions that lack compassion. How do you pick sides in a fight where both sides deserved to be punched by the hard fist of reality?
There are truly no winners here, but let me tell you there are some very big losers. Take your typical season ticket account executive for a NFL team. That person makes around $115K a year with salary and commissioned bonuses (at least the person I know in that position does). They're now either out of work or trying to sell a product that has nothing to offer. The parking garage attendants, the club-seating servants, the grounds facility at team training sites, the team trainers--all these people lost their livelihoods for absolutely no fault of their own. Their families, and thousands of others dependent upon the NFL business, suffer while the owners and players can't agree on how to divide up the last $185M of nearly $10B in revenue. That's criminally disgusting to me.
I'm not going to lie--I'll be back as a full-fledged NFL fan once the dust settles. But I know there are millions of people who will treat the NFL the way I treated both baseball and hockey when they foolishly and needlessly interrupted their seasons.
I was a huge NHL fan in the 90s and early 2000s, but since their labor stoppage I haven't watched more than a sporadic period here and there and have not spent one dime on anything NHL.
Baseball lost my passion in 1994 with the aborted season, and once my beloved Indians were no longer competitive the sport just faded away. I still try to attend a game or two every year, but I think the last time I watched more than an inning on TV was the 2006 World Series, and I no longer play fantasy baseball or really give a damn about who wins and loses.
I know the vast multitudes will flock back to the NFL, but perhaps 10% will just go away for good. I might not be a businessman, but I know that sacrificing 10% of my customer base over issues constituting less than 1% of my total business is probably asinine.
Now if you will excuse me, I'm going to clear my head with a stiff drink and pray for a quick resolution to all this pointless inanity. I have lost my optimism, painfully reminded of one of my favorite expressions. As the late, great Chuck Daly once opined, "A pessimist is an optimist with experience." Well said, coach!
